CS143: Compilers

July 3^rd, 2009

Just a reminder that you have a good amount of work to do, and a few deadlines on the horizon. The first programming project is due this come Tuesday evening just before midnight, and then your first written assignment is due at 5:00 p.m. on Friday, July 10^th. Everything's smooshed together during Summer Quarter, so these deadlines are necessarily close together. You certainly have all of the information you need to get both PP1 and Problem Set 1 done, so get to it.

For those of you new to regular expressions, finite automata, and context-free grammars, go ahead and download these. Inside there are a bunch of handouts, problem sets, and solution sets that help teach the same material. These are the handouts the other lecturers and I use when teaching the introductory theory classes, and they go into automata theory in just a little more detail than I do in CS143.

Note that I'm including a handout (and some problems) on pushdown automata. Pushdown automata are to context-free grammars as finite automata are to regular expressions. I'm not going to formally review pushdown automata in CS143, but we'll soon see that they kinda come up when talking about bottom-up, shift-reduce parsers, and implementation bison is, in part, backed by pushdown automata theory.

Enough about CS143! Get out and enjoy the sun, and have fun writing your Decaf lexer!!

June 23^rd, 2009

The final exam is currently scheduled for Friday, August 14^th at 3:30 p.m. I mention this, because all on-campus students must take the final exam, and they must take it during the officially scheduled time slot. True SCPD students (not those just electing to watch the videos online) may take the exam remotely, without proctor, any time after 3:30 p.m., provided you fax the exam in by 5:00 p.m. on Saturday the 15^th.

I'm trying very hard to ensure that all CS143 students are included in the course mailing list. You should confirm that you've registered for the course and that your email address is visible to all other Stanford students. You'll want to check your stanfordyou.stanford.edu settings to make sure that a legitimate email address is attached to your SUNet ID, and that that email address is marked as public. You'll otherwise be excluded from the Axess-generated mailing list I use to broadcast announcements that can't wait until the next lecture.